Taking my arm, she propelled me towards the Jamesway.
Inside, a man was slumped over a mug at a long table next to an inflated plastic palm tree. He was short, with a cloud of tangled black hair and a hat like a thermal doughnut.
âThis is LD,â said Dale. âIt stands for Little Dave, and heâs a grad student in marine biology. Heâs been up for thirty hours.â LD raised his head to flash me a Mephistophelean smile before resuming the slumped position. On the back of the door they had hung an Annoy-o-meter with an arrow which could be swivelled from Vaguely Irritating through to Murderously Provocative.
âWhoâs the baby?â I asked, pointing at a large chubby face smiling down from the canvas wall of the Jamesway.
âThatâs Mary,â said Dale. âSheâs one year old. I planned the birth so that I only missed one field season â this is my eighth. Season, I mean.â She put two insulated mugs of coffee on the table. âBefore I forget â all waste from the dry valleys is retrograded to McMurdo, and that includes grey water and human waste.â
âWhatâs grey water?â I asked.
âDishwashing water,â she said. âWe empty it into a drum out the back. As far as going to the bathroom is concerned, thereâs an outhouse we use behind hereâ â she gestured to the back of the Jamesway â âand in it a funnel connects to a drum. Thereâs a shit can for solids. And you need to take a pee bottle with you when you go for a walk, too.â
âSo you canât just pee on the ground?â I asked. âEven when youâre miles from camp?â
âNope. Weâre trying to maintain a pristine environment.â There was a pause. âListen,â she said in a low voice, as if she were about to breach the Official Secrets Act. âTake my advice. When you want to go to the bathroom in camp, use a pee bottle and decant the contents, rather than struggling to pee into the funnel. A tall man fixed the funnel in position to suit his own aim.â She sat back in her chair. âGod,â she said, âitâs good to have another woman here.â
Going to the bathroom : I wondered if there was any lavatorial situation Americans deemed too primitive for this dignified term. I had even seen a translation of the Bible in which King Saul entered a cave âto go to the bathroomâ.
Later, I put up my tent among a sprinkling of others behind four small laboratory huts (it was typical of their attitude to their work that the labs were more luxurious than the accommodation). At the far end of the lake the Canada Glacier, grubby with dust, blocked the northern horizon. Much of Antarctica is officially classified as a desert, and nothing proved it more effectively than the salt efflorescences on the shoreline of Lake Fryxell, thin white crusts like the salt pans of northern Chile. Some ponds in the Dry Valleys are so saline that they wonât freeze at minus sixty degrees Celsius, and the water is like molasses. On others the ice crusts, like lenses, concentrate so much solar energy that the bottom layers can reach temperatures of twenty-five degrees Celsius (or 77 degrees Fahrenheit).
In the afternoon I strapped on my crampons and walked out over the ice with LD and a hydrologist called Roland (LD said, âI do mud, he does waterâ). The lake was surrounded by a thin layer of âmoat iceâ which, as it was still early December, was frozen solid. By late January the moat ice would be gone. The fifteen-foot ice lid which covered the rest of the lake never melted. It was filled with tiny white bubbles and twisted into apocalyptic configurations â a fall might land you face down on a sword reminiscent of Excalibur. We did fall, though not on our faces. A wrong foot would not send us crashing into the glacial water, just down a foot or so through a pocket of blue neon air and on
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